Federal suit over state abortion law on fast track

Topeka — The chief federal judge for Kansas on Monday set what she called an aggressive schedule for a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood against parts of a new state abortion law dealing with providers’ websites and what information they must provide to patients before terminating pregnancies.

Judge Kathryn Vratil outlined the schedule as most of the law took effect. The schedule would allow a hearing on the merits of Planned Parenthood’s legal challenge to begin July 29 in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan.

Vratil ordered Planned Parenthood to file written legal arguments by July 16 and set a July 19 deadline for the state’s response. Planned Parenthood would then have until July 22 to file an additional reply.

“The Court sets this aggressive briefing schedule to accommodate the parties’ request to expedite a ruling on the merits,” Vratil wrote.

Vratil refused Sunday to prevent state officials from enforcing the provisions of the law being challenged by Planned Parenthood, which performs abortions at an Overland Park clinic. Planned Parenthood officials have yet to comment publicly on Vratil’s decision, despite requests for comment Monday.

However, in a separate state-court lawsuit by two doctors, a judge in Shawnee County temporarily blocked one of the requirements. It mandates that providers have a link on their websites to a state health department site on abortion and fetal development with a statement that the department’s information is objective and accurate.

Providers dispute information on the state’s site. They object to material suggesting a fetus can feel pain by the 20th week of pregnancy, when the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said as recently as last month that there’s no evidence of it.

Planned Parenthood also is challenging another provision that patients waiting for an abortion receive information with the same statements about the ability of a fetus to feel pain, as well as a statement that abortion ends the life of a “whole, separate, unique, living human being.”

Providers contend the provisions violate their free-speech rights. Supporters of the law argue that they’re designed to ensure that women considering abortion have multiple sources of information about its risks and fetal development.

Other parts of the law ban sex-selection abortions, block tax breaks for providers and prohibit them from furnishing materials or instructors for public schools’ human sexuality courses.

I have read the law and it also says that doctors must tell their patients that abortions cause breast cancer. Doctors claim there is no proof of this and so they are being asked to lie. The website for the state is also spelled out in the law, what it will say and not say. It too, is supposed to publish unsubstantiated health claims. I am pro life but I understand why this law is being contested. And I am of a mind that it very well should be.

By the way, he actually ran for governor and most likely won, but numerous write-in ballots were thrown out by the election board in what was also most likely the greatest and only significant example of election fraud in Kansas history, unlike the fake election fraud issues we are dealing with in this state now..

Very little evidence to prove your contention...and even less of a link to current Kansas government...unless you are pointing out that quack abortion doctors have been allowed to run unregulated by liberal politicians for a long time....it is time for those quacks to be stopped!

Glad to hear that you can put your personal beliefs aside to acknowledge what horribly coercive legislation this is. The ends do not justify these means, and the courts will rightfully eviscerate this garbage that in the meantime we have all payed taxes to defend.

I again find it baffling that article after article by the Associated Press contains no mention of the provision requiring doctors to falsely correlate abortion and breast cancer. Perhaps it's not specifically mentioned in the suits because they deemed the other compelled speech to be the even more of an unjust partisan overreach, but if so, that too is very surprising.

This is not a lie, it is matter of dispute with some, there is evidence to support the contention and that is why it was included...it should be something a patient considers for informed consent...no one is asking anyone to lie...

Your link has nothing to do with the Kansas law talked about in this story, IGWT. Thus it's not, as you say, "another perspective" to anything in the story about the Kansas law but rather simply an anti-abortion link.

You are correct this is not "another perspective" but it also is not an "anti-abortion link" either. It is a rather random biography of a guy that did goat gland transplants a long time ago in Kansas. Did you not actually click on the link?

Kansas law is not what it was supposed to be about, as you have assumed. It was another perspective about Planned Parenthood. The article was about Planned Parenthood and their behavior in other cases, which this article is also about. Apparently the link has been removed. Perhaps the pointer on the link was bad, pointing to some other article? If it was a bad pointer, my bad.

Abortion is the brutal violation of the human rights and dignity of the unborn child. Within the framework of the very liberal Supreme Court decisions on this issue there is room for reasonable regulation and informed consent for women.